It was Tall Ships Day, the long-anticipated bicentennial on the Fourth of July 1976. My coworkers and I were sitting around freezing in the too generously air-conditioned receiving room of the Sultan’s Retreat, still the most prestigious massage parlor on the Upper East Side. I was spacing out on the red-on-red velveteen wallpaper, a gold sateen pillow propped over my bare stomach to keep warm. Other girls were watching the giant boats sail up the Hudson on the tube. It was, as always, dark inside the massage parlor. The bright blue sky outside flickered live on the screen. There was no business, but the girls were not discouraged.
“Look at those hot pieces raggin’ in the wind,” one of them, Penny, said, pointing to a medium shot of a man hanging off a jib. “Any time now, I’m going to be rubbing that sailor’s cock, any time.”
“This place gonna be overrun, overrun. I can feel it in my clit,” Molly said.
“Listen, kids, I don’t know how to tell you this, but those guys aren’t coming in here,” I said.
“Why not, they’re sailors, ain’t they? Don’t we always get the ships in here? Look at ’em, hundreds of ’em,” Lorelei said.
“Yeah, but you’re not going to see them in the flesh,” I said.
Nobody paid any attention to me. They just kept gaping at the set.
“Man, I got me extra rubbers. I’m up for this. Bu’ness been slow as a dry turd lately. C’mon, boys, c’mon down,” Penny said.
“I’m telling you to forget it,” I said.
“Since when are you such an expert?” Molly said, turning her milky-white body over so that she could curl up in the corner of the couch. It was cold in there.
“You don’t have to be an expert to know they’re not those kind of sailors,” I said.
“Sailors is sailors,” Cleo said.
A chorus of “yeahs” and “right ons” followed. I wasn’t getting through. I decided to drop it.
We could have been a troupe of June Taylor dancers on a break, all fifteen or so of us outfitted exactly alike in our halter tops, diaphanous sultan pants, and spike heels. But one look around the big anteroom, its red flock walls lined with gold sofas covered with waiting women, and you’d have to notice the variety. Each one of us was a different type. Pretty clever on the part of Max and Sam, the two managers, the way they had stocked their stable, something for everyone.
We were all white, except for Cleo and Jasmine, who was Puerto Rican.
“It’s what the traffic will bear,” Max said matter-of-factly.
The Sultan’s Retreat might very well not have employed any women of color, at least in the daytime, seeing as how neither one of the managers had to answer to either the law or a liberal conscience, but Cleo was too good to pass up. She was probably the classiest whore in the place. Her hair was always perfectly coifed in a relaxed, soft flip, and her skin was her trademark. She was constantly swabbing her legs and her arms with perfumed lotions. Cleo could also be depended upon at some point during the long afternoon to deliver a lecture on nutrition. She knew exactly what wicked foods would block the colon, as well as what best promoted white teeth, shining eyes, and supple joints. As for Jasmine, she compensated for her Indian-brown skin by behaving at all times like the decorous lady. She was the only one of us who eschewed foul language, even referring to the johns as her “clients.”
My best friend’s name was Anita. She pronounced it “Anida.” She was a gorgeous young Irish-Italian woman from Bedford-Stuyvesant, a real lowlife from a long line of lowlifes, easily the most popular one in there, besides me when I had a suntan. Anita was tall, with slanty green eyes just like mine, only hers were extremely wide-set in a cat’s face. She wore her light brown hair long, parted in the middle, nothing fancy. Anita was a no-nonsense type of broad, with a highly developed sense of justice. Men are only after one thing, well, OK, they were only going to get one thing. No frills.
The john would say, “What’s your name, sweet thing?”
“Anida,” she’d say, sullen, pouting.
“Anita, that’s a pretty name,” he’d say.
“You wanna get on with it or what?” Anita would say, growing impatient.
She had no use for any of them.
The great part about the Retreat was the lack of overhead. This is what attracted women from all over the world, women like Colette from Marseilles, who was saving up for a beauty parlor in Queens; Lorelei, originally from West Berlin; and Rachel from Tel Aviv, who planned to go back, buy a big house on the water, and marry a professional man. I couldn’t figure out Rachel’s scam to save my life. She was a large, stocky woman with oily skin. In other words, she was homely, but somehow, she did a pile of business, all regulars. Michael had a theory that it was the nice, assimilated Jewish boys who had married shiksas.
“They like to sneak back home once a week for a little of Mama’s old-fashioned chicken soup,” he said.
But even Rachel was sitting around on her billowing behind with nothing to do on Tall Ships Day.
“Well, I know Charlie’ll be here. He needs me,” Cally-Ann said. She spoke with an Ozark drawl: “he naids mah.”
“I don’t see how you can stomach those zits all over his body,” Molly said.
“I don’ even notice ’em, pooah man. He’s the loneliest critter on this earth. I feel so sorry fer ’im. You know, Jake is jes after me and after me to quit the Life, but I cin’t, not so long as there’re pooah boys like Charlie comin’ around, naiding mah so,” Cally-Ann said.
“Yeah, and if you quit, where’s Jake gonna come up with his fig? He don’ want you to get out, I don’t care what kind of pillow talk he’s talking. You’re the best thing ever happened to that gambling deadbeat,” Penny said.
But even the zit-riddled Charlie was taking a powder. Things had never been this dead at the Retreat. At last, the women lapsed into silence, watching tall ship after tall ship crawl up the Hudson. The sky on the television screen turned a deeper, more brilliant blue. We watched the sailors hugging their wives and children, boys in the crowd mugging for the camera, faceless potentates waving from terraces high above the river. All of us sat there in the dark, watching and waiting. No one came at all.